ARE LIBERAL ARTS DEGREES COMPLETELY WORTHLESS? YES. AND THEY TELL THE WORLD THERE’S A 50%+ CHANCE YOU MIGHT BE A TOTALLY UNSKILLED TOOL

STOSSEL: “…lots of people not suited for higher education get pushed into it. This doesn’t do them good. They feel like failures when they don’t graduate. Vedder said two out of five students entering four-year programs don’t have a bachelor’s degree after year six.

“Why do colleges accept (these students) in the first place?”

Because money comes with the student—usually government-guaranteed loans.

“There are 80,000 bartenders in the United States with bachelor’s degrees,” Vedder said. He says that 17 percent of baggage porters and bellhops have a college degree, 15 percent of taxi and limo drivers. It’s hard to pay off student loans with jobs like those. These days, many students graduate with big debts.

Entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who got rich helping to build good things like PayPal and Facebook, is so eager to wake people up to alternatives to college that he’s paying students $100,000 each if they drop out of college and do something else, like start a business.

“We’re asking nothing in return other than meetings so we make sure (they) work hard, and not be in school for two years,” said Jim O’Neill, who runs the foundation.

For some reason, this upsets the left. A Slate.com writer called Thiel’s grant a “nasty idea” that leads students into “halting their intellectual development … maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich.”

But Darren Zhu, a grant winner who quit Yale for the $100,000, told me, “Building a start-up and learning the sort of hardships that are associated with building a company is a much better education path.“”